Tuesday, 31 January 2017

"At the end of a short period I began to feel that the prayer had,
so to speak, passed to my heart. In other words I felt that my heart in
its natural beating began, as it were, to utter the words of the prayer.
For instance, ONE "Lord"; TWO "Jesus"; THREE "Christ," and so forth. No
longer did I say the prayer with my lips, but listened attentively to
the words formed in my heart, remembering what my departed elder told me
about this state of bliss. Then I began to feel a slight pain in my
heart, ..."The Way of a Pilgrim.

"Anyway, I loved Graham Greene. His words were filled with a
discomfort I related to. There were all kinds of discomforts on offer.
Discomforts of guilt, sex, Catholicism, unrequited love, forbidden lust,
tropical heat, politics, war. Everything was uncomfortable, except the
prose. I loved the way he wrote. I loved the way he'd compare a
solid thing to something abstract. 'He drank the brandy down like
damnation.' I loved this technique even more
now, because the divide between the material and non-material worlds
seemed to have blurred. With depression. Even my own physical body
seemed unreal and abstract and partly fictional."

"No woman would kill a whale. Whales give birth to livin' young, they
don't lay eggs like fish. They feed their babies with milk from their
breasts, like women, and we never killed them. The man who killed the
whale never tasted whale meat from the time of his first kill until
after he'd retired as a whaler. And neither did his wife, because he had
to be purified and linked to the whale and the link was through his
wife, by way of the woman's blood and woman's milk, and this was a
promise made by Copper Woman, through the magic women, to the whales. No
one linked to them will eat of them. It is a promise."

Sunday, 29 January 2017

"In the morning I felt so fresh for writing, but now the idea that I
am to read to Max in the afternoon blocks me completely. This shows too
how unfit I am for friendship, assuming that friendship in this sense
is even possible."

Saturday, 28 January 2017

"A man can't sleep. He takes a job driving a cab all night. On his
first shift a woman gets in. 'By the river,' she says. They drive
downtown, across the sleepy clacking of the bridge. At the far end of
the bridge the road simply descends underwater. The man is surprised but
strangely unalarmed. The cab sinks down below the lamps and sidewalks,
into the waves. 'This is fine here,' says the woman. When she pays, the
scales on her body shimmer in the man's eyes."

"H.'s stories yesterday in the office. The stone breaker on the highway
who begged a frog from him, held it by the feet and with three bites
swallowed down first the little head, then the rump and finally the
feet. -- The best way to kill cats, who cling stubbornly to life:
Squeeze their throats in a closed door and pull their tails..."

Thursday, 26 January 2017

"Dad has always had a fear of flying. They were the only times in my
childhood that I could recall him drinking. As a rule, he avoided
flying, we traveled by car if we were going anywhere, regardless of how
far it was, but sometimes he had to, and then it was a case of knocking
back whatever alcoholic drinks were available in the airport café."

Wednesday, 25 January 2017

"It's curious to think of the ground between the trenches, a bank
which is practically never seen by anyone in the daylight, as it is only
safe to move through it at dark. It's full of dead things, dead animals
here and there, dead unburied animals, skeletons of horses destroyed by
shell fire. It's curious to think of it later on in the war, when it
will again be seen in daylight."

"What's certain, what I immediately experienced, when, around the
age of thirty, I began to enjoy writing, was that this pleasure always
communicated somewhat with the death of others, with death in general."

Sunday, 22 January 2017

"The myth is always the starting point of all poetry, including the
realistic, except that in the latter we accompany the myth in its
descent, in its fall. This collapse of the poetic is the theme of
realistic poetry."

"The rule is not not to eat animal meat. The rule is not to kill. So
when we encounter a dead doe on the road, we express our gratitude to
Earth and eat it. We must eat it so that life is not wasted. When we
stumble upon a dead pigeon in the dark, we thank Heaven and pluck it.
Thus I've eaten rabbits, weasels, raccoons."

Kyoko Yoshida, "Squirrel Heaven"

I just love, love, love this piece. She's definitely one of the most exciting English-language writers today!

Friday, 20 January 2017

"Essays should always be written neatly and legibly. Only a bad
essay-writer forgets to apply himself to the clarity of both the
thoughts and the letters. You should always think first before you
write."

Thursday, 19 January 2017

When I was four I followed my youngest uncle five miles across fields reclaimed from the sea, on and on until my little legs were buckling by the time we reached the sea that went soaring up to the sky.

Tuesday, 17 January 2017

"Supermarket produce sections have long been one of America's
underappreciated wonders. We think of supermarkets as being the places
where food is bought and sold, but they are simply the most visible part
of the massive, hidden network that sprawls out beneath them---and this
is especially true when it comes to produce."

Friday, 13 January 2017

"There will soon be nothing more than self-communicating zombies,
whose lone umbilical relay will be their own feedback image - electronic
avatars of dead shadows who, beyond death and the river Styx, will
wander, perpetually passing their time retelling their own story."

ぼくの発表タイトルは "What About Animals? In the Wake of Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima" で、これまでに他のところでも話してきた古川日出男、木村友祐の震災後の作品を扱っていますが、時間が限られていることもあって、特に古川さんの戯曲『冬眠する熊に添い寝してごらん』に焦点を絞って話しました。途方もないユーモアをもって、明治以後の日本の歴史を鋭く問う傑作です。

Saturday, 7 January 2017

"We walked on. Ah, these corridors of compulsory suffering and of terrible deprivation seemed endless to me, and perhaps they really were endless. The seconds were like whole lifetimes, and the minutes took on the size of anguished centuries. "

Friday, 6 January 2017

"For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that
reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms
resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I
alone do not exist."

Thursday, 5 January 2017

"If I close my eyes I see your ears, the left one sticking out more
than the right. My best friend at school used to claim that human ears
are like dictionaries and that, if you know how, you can look up words
in them. Limpid, for instance, Limpid."

Wednesday, 4 January 2017

'I write postcards. It's me who writes the ladies and gents of Philadelphia now. Postcards with a nice sea and the deserted Calangute beach, and on the back I write: Best wishes from Mailman Tommy. I've got up to letter C. Obviously I skip the areas I'm not interested in and send them without a stamp, the person who gets it pays.'"

Tuesday, 3 January 2017

"We only have sympathy to struggle and to write, Lawrence used to say. But sympathy is something to be reckoned with, it is a bodily struggle, hating what threatens and infects life, loving where it proliferates (no posterity or lineage, but a proliferation...).

Monday, 2 January 2017

"The natives use human excrement for tanning leather. When Bernal
Diaz came with Cortés to the great market-place of Mexico City, in
Montezuma's day, he saw the little pots of human excrement in rows for
sale, and the leather-makers going round sniffing to see which was the
best, before they paid for it."